Wednesday, July 10, 2013

I Get By with a Little Help from Free Fiction.

Some great free fiction this morning, including items from Tor, Nightmare Magazine, StarShipSofa, and more. More posts to come today.

[Art from "Homecoming" by Susan Palwick]

Fiction
• At AE: "Science Can't Fix Everything" by Shane D. Rhinewald. Science Fiction. "He still fights them in his mind. They come from the foliage after dark,
shadows that hardly make a sound. He can smell them before he can see
them, muck and gun oil and basa fish. They yell in a language he can’t
understand, and his heart thumps like an out-of-balance clothes dryer.
Guns crack, the air sings with bullets, and people die around him. They
gurgle and scream, clawing at the dirt while their blood deserts them."

• At HiLobrow: "The Clockwork Man - Part 17" by: E.V. Odle. Science Fiction. 1923. "Oh, God, it’s the end of all things, Gregg. It’s the end of all sane
hopes for the human race. If it is true that in the future man has come
to this, then the whole of history is a farce and mockery. The universe
is no more than a box of conjuring tricks, and man is simply a
performing monkey. I tell you, Gregg, this discovery, if it is made
known, will blast everything good in existence."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "The Krakatoan" by Maria Dahvana Headley. Horror. "The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work."

• At Tor.com: "Homecoming" by Susan Palwick. Dark Fantasy. "The sea is a crazy whore. That’s what Granny Crimson always said, in the
village where I was born. Stay on land, she said, stay to shore, farm
and grow and provide for your families, eh, lads. You’ll get nowt from
that strumpet Ocean, na, na, she’ll take everything you have, life and
riches and beauty, and leave you barren and dead, washed up broken on
the rocks, a thing for the crabs to eat."

Audio Fiction
• At Gypsy Audio: "The Baba Yaga Saga - Parts One and Two" by Colin McRobert. Fairy Tale. "The story of Baba Yaga was adapted for audio from the great Russian Fairy Tale by Colin McRoberts."

• At 19 Nocturne Boulevard: "The Hated" by Frederik Pohl. Science Fiction. "After space, there was always one more river to cross ... the far side of hatred and murder!" - Text here.

• At StarShipSofa: "Walking Stick Fires" by Alan DeNiro. Science Fiction. "A buddy story, the buds in question being aliens, but still most
excellent and savoury. Their gnarly adventures are set on (and under)
and Earth that is under terrible onslaught from a wide range of alien
species, both small and very, very large" - Best SF.

Other Genres
• At Every Day Fiction: "Ice Cubes" by Gwyn Ruddell Lewis